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Appeals Court Reinstates Apple's $120 Million Slide-To-Unlock Patent Win Over Samsung (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple Inc. won an appeals court ruling that reinstates a patent-infringement verdict it won against Samsung Electronics Co., including for its slide-to-unlock feature for smartphones and tablets. In an 8-3 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said a three-judge panel was wrong to throw out the $119.6 million verdict in February. Instead, it ordered the trial judge to consider whether the judgment should be increased based on any intentional infringement by Samsung. In this case, Apple claimed that Samsung infringed patents for the slide-to-unlock feature, autocorrect and a way to detect phone numbers so they can be tapped to make phone calls. The bulk of the award, $98.7 million, was for the detection patent that the earlier panel said wasn't infringed. The February decision also said the other two patents were invalid. That was a wrong decision, the court ruled Friday, because it relied on issues that were never raised on appeal or on information that was beyond the trial record. "The jury verdict on each issue is supported by substantial evidence in the record," Circuit Judge Kimberly Moore wrote for the majority.
It's actually a pretty interesting set of stuff. The slide-to-unlock patent covers a design that appears to be novel- no one ever did it before Apple, and everyone doing it was pretty obviously copying Apple. It's not the most effective or fastest way to provide the input, after all. Autocorrection sounds like a standard software patent, and it may have actually taken some effort to show that Samsung's version was infringing- to oppose this patent, you'd pretty much have to be opposed to ALL software patents (a reasonable position to be sure). Meanwhile, the telephone recognition is just taking existing rules and applying them "on a computer". That's pretty unarguably terrible in all ways.